Related Stories

You are Quebec City. You eat sleep and breathe hockey. Your community has an NHL-sized arena in place. Your annual peewee tournament attracts teams from all over the world, with kids sometimes playing in front of crowds of 14,000 and more.

All the while, as you thirst for NHL hockey, you enviously look at a struggling market like Florida, where the Panthers are averaging 8,849 fans per game - less than 400 more than you draw for the Quebec Remparts of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.

And yet, here’s what you heard coming out of the Board of Governors meeetings the past two days.

On Monday, commissioner Gary Bettman revealed that millionaire Bill Foley, who is interested in bringing an NHL franchise to Las Vegas, received no objections from the governors to proceed with embarking on a season ticket drive in Sin City aimed at gauging the interest in a team.

Then, on Tuesday, The Commish defiantly put an end to the chatter that has been making the rounds in the press and on social media that the struggling Panthers might be prime candidates to move, with the logical destination being - you guessed it - Quebec City.

After all that, if you feel slighted, especially with how the Panthers continue to be supported by the league when they’ve received minimal of it from the sports fans down here in these parts, well, you have every reason to scratch your head.

“Nobody should be focusing on the Panthers as a relocation candidate. Period,” Bettman said Tuesday at the conclusion of the two-day meetings. “It’s inconsistent with everything we know and believe, it’s inconsistent with everything (owner) Vinnie Viola would be telling me and inconsistent meaning he has no intention of moving the club. He is committed to South Florida.”

Voila has embarked on a campaign in which the days of freebie ducats and discounts galore have evaporated, thereby getting a better indication of who the actual true fans are. For his part, Bettman firmly stands behind the blueprint Panthers ownership has adopted, despite the fact that the optics are awful every time viewers see a sea of empty seats during broadcasts of Panthers home games.

In his mind, patience must be exhibited.

“If we’re having this conversation in two or three years, it might be a different issue,” Bettman said. “But I don’t believe we will. I believe that this market will support the Panthers and that they will reform the way they’ve done business over the last few years and I think the community will respond positively.”

We’re betting those words are difficult for the hockey-crazed zealots in Quebec City to digest. At the same time, Bettman did keep the door open by saying it could be a different story a couple of years down the road.

And keep this in mind too; those attempting to lure a team to the Quebecor Arena have been very quiet concerning their intentions in recent times. That’s how the league likes it. Remember how Mark Chipman and his friends remained muzzled prior to Winnipeg getting the Jets. They kept their lips zipped in order to play by the league’s rules.

Rightly or wrongly, that was Jim Balsillie’s biggest mistake in 2007 during his efforts to bring the Nashville Predators to Hamilton. Unlike Foley, the then-Blackberry magnate did not have a green light from the league to undertake his own ticket drive, one in which he sold season tickets and suites on a website.

Asked about Foley’s season ticket campaign, Bettman replied: “The only other precedent, which was a bad precedent, was somebody went off without permission and did it in the context of moving an existing club that wasn’t going to move. There’s a huge difference between that and this.”

He didn’t identify Balsillie by name. He didn’t have to.

Bettman cautioned that the league has gone no further than to give him the thumbs up for his request. Nothing more.

The NHL will meet with Foley next week. The actual season ticket drive is said to be about a month away.

In being peppered with questions concerning Las Vegas, Bettman addressed the issue of potentially having a team in the betting capital of the world.

“What I will tell you is that when you’re looking at the gambling issue, and you look at the book in Vegas, we’re about one percent of the take,” Bettman said. We are a small factor. It’s the nature of the game. From a gambling standpoint, football and basketball, both at the college and professional level, is much more prevalent. If we get to that point, we’ll have to evaluate it, but it’s not something we’ve focused.

“Which again, for those of you who think this is a done deal in Vegas: it’s not.”